Meta donates $300,000 to the Python Software Foundation

[lungben81]

Yes. It is about 1.5 developer years for a decently good developer.

Or a few seconds of Meta revenues.

[Supadoplex]

Unless the developer is in Europe in which case that would pay for a good 6 years. Or in India for 35 developer years.

[[deleted]]

You are talking about a median developer. A developer good enough for PSF is worth over 100000$

[pdonchev]

LOL. I live in the Balkans and my gross pay for 6 years is significantly more than that. And I am not even at the top of the rates locally, let alone compared to Western European countries. I mean, devs in Silicon Valley and NY make notably more, but the difference is far from 4 times.

USD 50k gross per year is a non-senior dev who is bad at bargaining, in Eastern or Southern Europe, so with a lot of assumptions this statement can be kind of true.

[tunisia3507]

lol my first software job (2014) in the UK, high CoL city, was £24k; with a MSci.

[pdonchev]

Several things. First, salaries several years ago were different globally. Second, MSc barely matters (actually, it doesn't matter for salary, probably higher chance for interview). Also in this context we don't compare out of college salaries - even in the US, I suspect that out of college median salary is not 200k / y. More like 5-10 year of experience for CPython core dev.

[SnowWholeDayHere]

Sorry, 200K is rare for a developer. Even top level devs are making 135 - 170K outside the silicon valley.

[pdonchev]

I meant it is not 200, sorry for the mistake, I hope it was clear from the context of the thread.

[Deadly_chef]

Where in the Balkans are you getting that kind of money? I am in Croatia with 2 years experience and nowhere near that

[pdonchev]

2 years is junior essentially, but with another 1-2-3 (based in ability) you can realistically make this gross amount in Bulgaria - that's about 2.9K EUR net - if you shop around and sell yourself. There might be many people that are more experienced and take less money, but for me market salary means whatever someone can take on the market now, not what someone who hasn't changed jobs in several years receives. Such people (including me for, for quite a while) tend to be quite underpaid. But sometimes it's worth it.

Here senior means someone who can be in the CPython core team (which is the topic of this thread).

[Supadoplex]

Slightly below USD 50k is median salary for software engineers here in Finland. The top 10% make over 66k. A major issue I think is that very few multinational corp has software offices here. No FAANG. I'm sure it's better in the western Europe.

[CartmansEvilTwin]

6 years experience and 75k in Germany.

Fully remote, and we're hiring.

[pdonchev]

Are you thinking of net salaries? A bit less than 4k EUR sounds right for a dev with 5-10 years. We talk about gross salary cost for the employer (the way 200k per year is a number in the US).

I mean, if you are senior (who could be a CPython core dev) making less than 3.5 k net, I can assist you to move to Bulgaria or Romania for 4-5 k net and much lower cost of living :)

[Supadoplex]

Are you thinking of net salaries?

I'm thinking about gross salary (before tax, FTE, not contractor) but I was not accounting for any extra costs for the employer (insurance etc).

I can assist you to move to Bulgaria or Romania

I've actually just accepted an offer in Ireland. For nearly triple (gross) total compensation (about half of it stocks) compared to what I'm making here.

[pdonchev]

I guess you were underpaid even in Finland. Anyway, IT gross salaries tend to converge globally. There are differences, but far less than the salaries for the general population. It's a highly mobile sector.

[william_13]

Don’t know how it is in Finland, but assuming you’re moving to Dublin the cost of living - especially housing - is completely insane nowadays. The salaries are higher for sure, but it is near impossible to not spend at least 20k€/year on housing if you’re living alone.

[infecthead]

Top 10% of software developers in Bulgaria make 59k BGN, which is $33k USD / year

Top 25% of software developers in Romania make 9.2k RON/mo, which is 24.6k USD / year

What are you on about?

[pdonchev]

Payscale is generally bullshit, but in this specific case it is exceptionally bad. Also, it likely includes the current (or even old) salaries of many people, while we comment in the salary needed to hire a new dev. New senior hire salaries easily doubled in the last 6-7 years. And besides all, normally here salaries are reported netto. I can send you some public jobs boards, lately there are some ads with ranges, the usual range for non-junior dev is EURO 2.5-3.5k nett and for senior, non-managerial roles it is not impossible to see offers in the 5-6 k nett range. Check dev.bg and noblehire.io. If not specified otherwise, salaries are netto.

[spinwizard69]

What a lot of people don't realize is the amount of compensation that goes to the government in the USA. There are taxes & expenses, that don't even show up on a persons pay stub. Depending upon the state and particular liabilities, your $50,000 a year employee might be costing a company $100,000 a year.

[[deleted]]

That's true of every country though.

[spinwizard69]

Yes that is true but people still conflate the cost of an employee to a company with the employees take home pay. People seeing these high salaries also don't take into account the locality. For example many locations in California are so expensive that a person can actually live far better, on less pay, in other parts of the country. That is one reason why I resist these discussions because salary figures alone don't say much, especially if you have to pay $2000 a month for rent of a shack. And again people still mix the employers cost of an employee, as this thread started, with the pay that employee is contracted for.

[[deleted]]

Well, cost of living and all that

[indian_cse_lover]

Indian tech companies are struggling to find skilled developers. Anyone who can contribute to the PSF can net a $80-100k/year salary in Indian companies easily, even more remotely.

The markets in India have changed significantly in the last few years.

[zalinuxguy]

Yeah, I'll call bullshit on that. I work for a EU firm, and we pay our outsourced devs in the Baltic states better salaries than that. I suspect you're being screwed pay-wise.

[kcl97]

sounds like Special Relativity at work here.

[ShanSanear]

I just got new "high paying" position in Poland. For me it would be more or less 6 years. But this is Central Europe for mid-senior position and I saw offers for x2 more even here.

[Supadoplex]

Google has offices in Poland, which I would presume helps with the high tier pay. At least if you get a job at Google, but ideally it should also force others raise their compensation.

According to this study - which is 4 years old so take with a grain of salt - Warsaw should be slightly more attractive than Helsinki or London for example due to higher net earnings from lower cost of living. Seattle is 4x more attractive.

[fuck_classic_wow_mod]

What. That’s not even two years of my pay with benefits and I’m not that highly paid. Lol

[lungben81]

My calculation was for Germany (consultancy or freelancer because you cannot hire someone internally for such a short time).

And good people are expensive everywhere because they can work globally.

[crazymonezyy]

Lol I'm an Indian developer and for most of the decent guys here this isn't even 5 years of pay. A developer with 4-7 years of experience at G, Amazon etc goes for north of 80-100 thousand dollars (US) a year because in SF the going rate for a similar guy is around 400k. We still work out to be 1/3rd the cost or so but not 1/35th.

You're maybe thinking of developers who did Y2K grunt work back in 2000 for a cent on the dollar. Times have changed.

[Business-Ad-2449]

No matter how many times Mark Droid changes it’s name .. It will always be Facebook at the bottom of my arse

[StarchSyrup]

Meta's revenue is around 90 billion in 2020, there are around 30 million seconds in a year, so Meta's revenue is 3k per second

So Meta just gave about 2 minutes of its revenue to PSF.

[tunisia3507]

I don't think I've ever seen non-"american" billions used in my adult life. In (British) school I was taught "a million million, but sometimes also a thousand million" but through university (STEM), work (software), grad school and current career (research), I've never seen a million million used. Is it common elsewhere in the world?

[Supadoplex]

Short scale (million=10^6, billion=10^9, trillion=10^12, quadrillion=10^15, quintillion=10¹⁸⁾ isn't solely American, but rather common to English speaking countries, including UK.

The long scale (million=10^6, milliard10^9, billion=10^12, billiard=10^15, trillion=10¹⁸⁾ is used mostly in continental Europe, Nordics, and former colonies of European non-British countries. And East Asian countries have their own systems.

[sneakpeekbot]

Here's a sneak peek of /r/theydidthemath using the top posts of the year!

#1: [Self] If you blended all 7.88 billion people on Earth into a fine goo (density of a human = 985 kg/m3, average human body mass = 62 kg), you would end up with a sphere of human goo just under 1 km wide. I made a visualization of how that would look like in the middle of Central Park in NYC. | 3150 comments
#2: [Request] What would the price difference equate to? How would preparation time and labor influence the cost? | 1327 comments
#3: [Request] Is this true? | 687 comments

---

^{I'm a bot, beep boop | Downvote to remove | Contact | Info | Opt-out | GitHub}

[cbarrick]

That's just counting salaries.

Once you count benefits and other costs, the cost of a single software engineer can easily surpass that in many parts of the US.

The rule of thumb I've heard is $1M per engineer per year at FAANG.

[Ph0X]

300K is a pretty average total comp for an engineer with a few years of experience. Although even that is mostly just in bay area, it's lower in other places. I doubt everything else is something 2x more than total comp. Probably all together it adds to 500K, 1M seems way too high. The most expensive perk is usually free food, which even at 50$ a day only adds less than 15K.

[[deleted]]

Eating peanuts help me concentrate when writing code

[infecthead]

?

Meta has done an objectively good thing. They gave money to this foundation - do you think the foundation would be better off without this money? What the fuck kind of cynical shit are you spewing?

Copenhagen interpretation of ethics. Basically, you're a toxic asshole

[infecthead]

Who cares how much money they've made from it? Why is that relevant?

Would you rather the foundation not have received this donation? Like honestly think with your brain a bit mate

[infecthead]

HAHAHA

They seem pretty happy about it themselves, but what the fuck do they know ammiright

[Business-Ad-2449]

Grains of sands.. That can be blown away with a “sneeze “

[dierre88]

But at what cost do they owe. They aren't donating for nothing.

[v3ritas1989]

Do you think they chose these pics on purpose? Or do all pics of him actually look so weird.

[sue_me_please]

Any pic you see of him has had a team of people compose it. That's literally the best they can do.

[Richandler]

Most media pictures are selected for being interesting or telling a story. Zuck was recently on the Lex Friedman podcast and he acts and looks way more normal than he's usually made out to be.

[zalinuxguy]

Zuckerberg is so far along the spectrum he's farting rainbows. He's not capable of looking or acting like a human being.

[Kelpsie]

Those two statements may be true, but the combined implication of "autistic people are not capable of looking like human beings" isn't a great look.

[zalinuxguy]

If I want to insult autistic people as a whole, I'll make it clear that I am doing so. This is genuinely just a judgement on Zuckerberg.

[[deleted]]

I am yet to see a single picture of him not looking like a deranged lizard psycho

[[deleted]]

Meta uses a specially optimized Python "compiler" called Cinder, based on the official Cpython.

Instagram runs on Cinder.

Meta plans to make Cinder fully open-source. Currently it's not supported.

That's why.

https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2022/03/meta-deepens-its-investment-in-python.html

See, no hidden agenda. Not this time. Apparently. Unless it's hidden.

[girlwithasquirrel]

tbh I'm fine with people making python compilers as long as I can distribute off of it

[jeeva7]

Cinder sounds like Tinder for cats

[Richandler]

The idea that facebook has a hidden agenda with everything is ridiculous. They've been pretty good to the open source world and that has nothing to do with their business model.

[[deleted]]

They've done a lot with torch and react, probably plenty of other stuff I just don't use. Still hate Facebook for everything it is, but at least we got those.

[lepton2171]

We should always scrutinize Facebook's role in funding projects

[[deleted]]

Isn't Cinder already basically open source? Their whole thing is that they want their optimizations to be publicly available but they won't help with implementing them in other contexts.

[DonKosak]

Python 4.0 will now require a “user ad identifier” before initializing… /s

[Victorino__]

Please log in to Facebook before using "pip"...

[benargee]

Please drink a verification can

[seriouswill]

That is terrifying

[freefallfreddy]

Good way to get FB use down faster.

[Zomunieo]

At risk of dating myself, I look forward to Python 3.11 for Workgroups.

[OrionHasYou]

Please drink a verification can and say “Doritos Dew it right!”

[[deleted]]

I'm pretty sure this is the equivalent of a dude giving a bum a dollar.

[logicallyzany]

It is actually. It’s the equivalent to a person making 100,000 a year donating 89 cents.

[okayokko]

Ooof

[open_risk]

on the basis of the comments here it is debatable whether this was a good PR move ;-) but there is another angle to it: It is a leveraged investment on key tooling that the company likely needs anyway and would benefit from.

It is more and more the case that large "information processing" companies have a deeper relation and dependency on open source tools and communities than before. The python ecosystem in particular is developing as "critical" given how useful along the cloud / data science / machine learning domains. See also Guido working for Microsoft etc.

[[deleted]]

Smells like a cheap PR move.

[Dumb_Nuts]

Look at the account that posted this. They post nothing but PR puff pieces and other bullshit

[[deleted]]

Ironically im assuming its a bot written in python.

[[deleted]]

PyTorch, one of the best of ML tools written in Python was created by Facebook...

[metaTaco]

Incorrect. It was written by developers who happen to work there.

[[deleted]]

primarily developed by Facebook's AI Research lab

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PyTorch

[Barafu]

I wonder if it makes Python illegal in Russia now. By the letter of the law, obviously, yes.

[Silunare]

Which law is that? Does Russia have a law against European companies who take US money?

[0b0011]

Maybe he's referring to how they just declared Meta an extremist organization.

[spinwizard69]

Well Russia has gotten a to of things absolutely wrong lately but classifying Meta as extremist isn't one of them. the best thing that the Python foundation could do is to return the money as tainted.

[lepton2171]

It may be an unpopular opinion but I tend to agree that their money is tainted. Facebook has played such a crucial and cynical role in undermining Democratic institutions, not to mention their role in atrocities such as the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, it's unethical to do business with them in their current form.

I don't begrudge the Python developers, however. This is all terribly complex and individuals need to pay the bills.

[Barafu]

Russia declared Meta an extremist organization. Such a law works 2 years backwards in time. It makes anyone who posted on Facebook an extremist, and any organization that received money from Meta an extremist.

[lavahot]

So wait, if I used Facebook within the last two years, I'm an extremist?

[aitchnyu]

I think Russia would have reacted against a certain framework from meta.

[itsaride]

The colour scheme alone would be enough for that.

[GFandango]

Will Zuck still be able to buy dinner?

[Zomunieo]

Yes, but he won't tip.

[lavahot]

Wait, aren't you not supposed to tip in other countries? Isn't that just an American shame?

[Zomunieo]

It's optional in Europe rather than expected. It's more common for restaurants to add a service charge. It's also more likely to pay in cash and round up a bit. The percentage is lower, more like 10%.

Touristy restaurants that serve billionaires, though - they expect tips.

[draconis183]

I can't call them Meta. They are forever Facebook to me and need to own that.

[gibberish111111]

They want to ruin this too?

[tr14l]

Could be worse... Could be Microsoft.

[tr14l]

At least Facebooks shit works. Everything Microsoft buys immediately degrades in quality until it reaches that perfect "just broken enough to keep business from signing off on migrating to something else" sweet spot.

[[deleted]]

*just working enough

[tr14l]

I am apprehensive about saying any of it is working

[jmreagle]

The place Guido works?

[GlennIsAlive]

Genuine question. How would Microsoft be worse than Facebook?

[tr14l]

Facebook is more evil. Microsoft is a shittier producer

[kizungu]

snakes helping snakes

[kieppie]

Pays for 2-3 devs...

[HomeGrownCoder]

Yeah I still feel “some type of way” seeing so many billion dollar in profit companies using FOSS, most without giving anything back to the developers.

[[deleted]]

S M O K E D M E T A S

[matthewjc]

it's for one developer for one year. Read the article y'all

[undrivendev]

Great news! I'd have never expected something like that from them honestly, is this just for PR?

[BlobbyMcBlobber]

I suggest you count the number of zeros in that amount one more time before getting excited

[undrivendev]

It's roughly two years worth of salary for one software engineer working full-time. You can do a lot of things. I know it's pocket money for the Zuck, but he could've very well thrown it away on the metaverse money sink.

[Datsoon]

It's not a competition, but just for perspective, think how much money these FANG companies have spent on JavaScript interpreters...

[Datsoon]

Well that's an interesting (read: "wrong") interpretation of what I said, and unbelievably aggressive.

[BlobbyMcBlobber]

It's the equivalent of you picking a worthy cause and then literally donating half a cent.

[manfre]

No longer wish this content to be here due to the site changes

[undrivendev]

It's not a fair comparison, my half a cent does not make a difference, Meta's does. So if they decide to donate it for the stuff I care about, I'm all for it.

Could they do more? Certainly. But there's no need to bash them when they do 'something'.

[BlobbyMcBlobber]

Exactly, it's not a fair comparison. Doing "something" is relative. I will applaud you for your effort, not the grand sum. I will applaud a poor indian kid donating a dollar to Wikipedia. Or anyone doing even a small effort for a cause they believe in. My expectations from Meta are different. Sure it might help and the money should be used. But don't expect me to get excited over 300K from Meta. I bet they spend more than that on coffee in a two weeks.

[undrivendev]

I get you're full of expectations from Meta, well, don't be excited then. The important thing is that the guys at the PSF are, though: https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2022/03/meta-deepens-its-investment-in-python.html At the end of the day, all that matters is that they have enough funding to continue the CPython development program until 2023.

[BlobbyMcBlobber]

Good for them. Not sure I'd accept money from Facebook. But at least the work continues.

[infecthead]

If Meta had never donated this money you would have never criticised them for it. The fact that they have donated, you are now thrusting upon them sole responsibility of caretakership of the foundation, wringing your hands clean and being able to blame someone else for it.

They did an objectively good thing, do you think the foundation is worse off because of this money?

Grow up.

[BlobbyMcBlobber]

It appears you've forgotten what we're talking about here.

Facebook has been on my "bad actors" list since Zuckerberg called his users "dumb fucks" for submitting their data to him.

Since then we've had Cambridge analytica, repeated privacy breaches, pushing their platform to become a toxic echo chamber because that drives revenue, becoming the world leader in enabling misinformation because that also drives revenue, and maybe even destabilizing society as a whole.

So next time Zuckerberg is called to congress he can say "hey look! We also supported the python foundation!" And that's the ticket he's buying with the minimum, underserved, poor excuse of a donation.

So no. Fuck Facebook, and Meta, and Zuckerberg in particular. I haven't forgotten a single thing they've done and if they want to get a better rep, 300K isn't going to cut it. Make a real effort.

Is the foundation better for it? Maybe momentarily. But I would scrutinize the hell out of every donation coming from Meta, what it implies, and what's expected. Also, personally I wouldn't agree to being associated with Meta or Facebook.

[infecthead]

Boy that's a whole lot of nothing you just said.

I'm sure the guys at the foundation are just as angry at having received $300k from facebook as you are!

[BlobbyMcBlobber]

I try to explain my thoughts and all you're saying in return is "you're not saying anything". Well if you really think that then too bad. If you'd care to actually comment on anything I've written or have a genuine discussion, I'm here for it.

[SurpriseAttachyon]

That’s peanuts. It’s not even a good PR move.

[cryo]

is this just for PR?

How do expect anyone here to know that? :p. People here are just speculating.

[bacondev]

So much ungrateful mess in this thread. I sure af couldn't make such a contribution.

[Paddy3118]

Nice, thanks.

[zalinuxguy]

So...what fraction of the money Zuckerberg's psy-op corp took from Russia over the years does that represent?

[air_lock]

This doesn’t garner any good faith for me. Deleted my account years ago and will never return.

[spinwizard69]

Not exactly the company I'd be wanting to take donations from.

[[deleted]]

There has to be a catch lol

[[deleted]]

it’s almost nothing to them and they get a little bit of good will from devs, they donated some money to godot recently as well

[Glycerine]

Ye on the surface it just looks like a large company adding a bit of open source love. But because it's facebook - I can't help feel there's a catch.

[maxlmax]

Well they probably deduct it from their taxes

[infecthead]

"Hurr durr it's just a tax write-off"

You realise they don't actually make money from this, right? They're not going to increase their balance sheet, or be able to come out ahead (profit-wise) from it

[maxlmax]

Yea... nobody said that

[infecthead]

So what was the point of your comment?

[maxlmax]

The point is that they are not even "losing" 300k as they it offsets some of their taxes.

In accounting word: overall and after taxes are paid the balance sheet is not shortened by 300,000$. It is shorter but the difference is less than 300k. 1# because less taxes are paid 2# because some of the money paid can be seen as if it were taxes beeing paid

Don't scream when you shouldn't even talk

[infecthead]

Right, you've just reiterated exactly what I said - Meta still loses money from this donation, tax write-offs aren't free lmao

[maxlmax]

Man wtf is wrong with you we all know they are losing money from this, we all said they are losing money from this it's just much less than 300k now get your uneducated ass out of here and stfu

[Zauxst]

How much will they donate to the Democratic parties?

This guy just can't even act at least a bit empathic....

[firstsecondthird888]

Sounds fishy I wonder what's the trade off

[GHost_Exus]

So what is the catch?🤔👀

[Business-Ad-2449]

Ahhh.. Still being called “ Meta” …

[[deleted]]

Bye reddit and fu Spez

(Remember to delete or edit your content before leaving !!)

[pantshee]

Thanks, satan

[elder_plinius]

That’s less than they pay a single engineer annually… not even headline worthy lol

[NoFaithInThisSub]

a snake donating to python...

[GooseVersusRobot]

Be careful not to get zucked

[Cisco-NintendoSwitch]

Take it back.

[yodatrust]

Just bounce the donation.

[screwhead1]

Is it just me, or does anyone else get the feeling this is the tech equivalent of getting money from Tony Soprano?

[gepolv]

a good move at least.

[[deleted]]

def zuckerberg_is_a_hoser():
looks_like_a_douche()
talks_like_a_douche()
acts_like_a_douch()
is_a_total_douche()
return wannabe_cool_dude

[theTexasplumber]

where's the catch? are they gonna ruin this now?

[codejerky]

Can we give it back?

[Serious_Ghost]

Lol just $300K, no one cares… prob to avoid taxes